Exclusive: Internal Videos Show Why the Microsoft Kin Cratered

The Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two

Do you remember the Microsoft Kin? It’s okay if you don’t — Microsoft certainly would like for you to forget it ever existed. Kin was a family of phones from Microsoft that launched to much fanfare in 2010, sold incredibly poorly, and that the company killed just 48 days later. Orange juice has a longer shelf life.

The Kin was Microsoft’s attempt to roll out a hip, new phone — you know, for kids. The Kin One and Kin Two were built around media, putting music, photos and social media at the heart of the experience to try and capture the youth market. But it turned out that kids don’t like things that don’t work any better than the rest of us do. That meant the Kin proved to be more or less dead on arrival for a variety of reasons. It was too expensive and had too few apps, for example. But mostly, it just sort of sucked.

These internal Microsoft videos, provided to Wired by a person who worked on the project, show focus groups testing the ill-fated Kin. According to our source, these are pre-production models that changed very little from the shipping product, although “performance improved some prior to shipping.” Watch them, and you can readily see why the project tanked: Kin phones just weren’t usable. Or, as our source described them, they were a “pile of shit.”

Given Microsoft’s slew of new releases that break from the past, like Windows 8, Windows RT, Surface, and Windows Phone 8, these Kin videos seem worth a second look to see why the company so badly needed to start over from scratch. Also? They’re kind of hilarious.

In this first video, testers are giving open-ended, overall feedback in their own words. It’s not good. As one product tester notes, “It’s frustrating, I can imagine my daughter would give this back very quickly.”

In the era of apps, it’s easy to forget that the most basic function of a smartphone is making calls. That is, unless you can’t make them. Watch these frustrated testers try to do some basic dialing:

In this touch usability study, the lag-prone interface causes clear problems for testers: